Google Apps for Your Domain (GAYD) has become a great tool for our small business clients. One feature they are very happy with is the e-mail, which is based on the GMAIL platform. With the advent of the Blackberry and the Treo phones, the GAYD makes it easy to to keep up with your e-mail.

We are now so entrenched with POP3 that along the way everyone forgot the IMAP. There were several reasons why IMAP fell by the wayside, but one of those reasons was the cost of online storage for mailboxes. GAYD offers 6GB per mailbox on their free service. If I were to equate this to what I have stored in my Outlook, my .pst file is about 2 GB. If you have a version of Outlook prior to 2007, your maximum storage is 2GB, and Outlook starts to “wig out” when you get close to 1.9 GB. So, it would make sense to say that 6GB should be plenty of mailbox storage for the average e-mailer.

GMAIL, as well as GAYD, offer an icon download for your Blackberry that once it is installed on the Blackberry desktop, you just have to click it to view your e-mail. For the Treo, it gets a bit sticker. Verizon’s Treo allows you a PC/Windows based interface or a Palm interface, so setting up your e-mail is a bit different between the two. The Palm website offers a great tutorial on setting up your e-mail account, which requires downloading a program to the phone. You can search the Palm website for the appropriate program.

If you have desktop/laptop and want to be able to send/receive from both your computer and cell phone, the easiest option is to enable the IMAP feature in your e-mail account, then reset up your Outlook according to the IMAP settings up at Google. Then on your phone, you can set up an IMAP e-mail account.

What will then happen is that if you send an e-mail from your phone, when you open up your Outlook on your PC, it will also be there. So, what is the difference between the IMAP & POP3? The main difference is that your e-mail is stored online with an IMAP account and Outlook just “manages” the organization of how you view your e-mail. You can set up folders, etc. just like you do with a POP3 account. You have the advantage of not losing e-mails, or of needing to view or see an e-mail that you already downloaded to your computer if using POP3.

Because GMAIL has great spam filtering, it is in your best interests to disable your spam filter in your Outlook if using IMAP.

The only disadvantage with IMAP is that you still need some way to be able to back up your e-mail should the online system crash.  Right now it appears that the only way to save the online e-mails is to set up the POP3 and download them all to your system.  Another option is to have your computer use POP3, but your phone IMAP so that at least you will have the e-mails you sent from your phone in your e-mail box.